Nothing strikes terror in the heart of parents quite like the thought of calamity befalling their children. But in writer/director Maren Ade’s already legendary (and freshly Oscar-nominated) German dramedy Toni Erdmann, a father inflicts …
Read More →First published on Flicks on November 27, 2020
The 25th anniversary of Terry Gilliam’s time travelling classic, about a world struck by a deadly virus, arrives during a year marked by a real-life pandemic. Critic …
Read More →First published on Flicks on October 9, 2018
To define a Paul Greengrass film as “intensely realistic” is to offer a description so commonly used and self-evident it comes close to meaning nothing at all. …
Read More →First published on The Guardian on April 4, 2019
Nobody predicted the immense success of Australian Damon Gameau’s 2015 directorial debut, That Sugar Film, a candy-coloured, Supersize Me-esque documentary exploring the effects of consuming sugar …
Read More →First published on The Guardian on October 17, 2018.
There is something both audacious and defeatist about writers of wrong-side-of-the-tracks stories who delight in obsessing over abominable characters and then, in a last-ditch …
Read More →The title of writer/director George Nolfi’s SCI-FI action romance The Adjustment Bureau is one of the least enticing of recent times. Those three uninspiring words do make sense in a story context; they sound like a description …
Read More →There is something perversely amusing about watching a pulpy B-grade movie pursue extreme historical revisionism. The title is as high concept as they come: a pithy description of what lies in store for audiences, should they …
Read More →If you could go back in time whenever you wanted, and introduce yourself to a person you had a crush on, again and again, refining your pick up moves until eventually this person fell for you, …
Read More →Taylor “that other guy from Twilight” Lautner scores his first starring role as an on-the-run knucklehead in Abduction, director John Singleton’s vacuous low-rent riff on The Fugitive (1993).
If nothing else, Lautner has found consistency with his emerging oeuvre: a …
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There are few words reviewers can apply to thrillers and suspense films that are more clichéd than “Hitchcockian.” There are also few directors whose body of work is more suited to that label than American …
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